Posts Tagged ‘Project Orion’

Project Orion was a proposal to propel spaceships by means of pulsed nuclear explosions. It had the support of Freeman Dyson, Werner von Braun, Stanislaw Ulam and other physicists and rocket scientists, but was abandoned by the Air Force in 1959 and rendered illegal by the Test Ban Treaty of 1963.

When I was a teenager in the late 1940s and early 1950s, I took it for granted that by 2012, there would be human colonies on the Moon and Mars. I thought Robert A. Heinlein’s Future History was a plausible scenario for what would happen. I’m no longer sure colonization of the Solar System is feasible, let alone sending starships to other solar systems. All I can say is that I would like to think it is possible for humankind can venture out into the rest of the universe, and I think the possibility is worth exploring.

Newt Gingrich is regarded as a crackpot for advocating a mission to Mars, but not for advocating an attack on Iran. The latter would be at best a monstrous crime, the former at worst a glorious folly.